Before LFD we'd find groups on our own server. Sometimes we'd find someone we liked and try to recruit them. People who needed guilds could run instances to find a guild that needed them. It wasn't formal like an application or realm post, it wasn't all-accepting like a trade spam ad, but it was somewhere in the middle and undeniably social.

Since you were already in a group and had a role and gear and all that, the focus was not on any of that. Instead it was on the person behind the character. Are they a good fit? Do they have the personality the guild is looking for? These are hard to find in a group, but even harder in an online application.

Ultimately they have to join and go through a trial period. Without grouping before, it's likely that more trials will fail.

@G-Rebel: I have to admit, this is something about which I can do little more than blindly speculate. Maybe Blizzard could track guild invites/leaves/kicks and time in guild and compare. But I doubt they employ many virtual sociologists.

If you want to do a lot of 5 mans at odd times then the new system seems to really support that. Grab whoever is interested and round out with pugs. That may make being in a guild less frustrating. (I've certainly been in raid guilds where none of our tanks need or want heroics which is frustrating).

For raiding it doesn't seem that it should make much difference. You need a guild to raid for fights of any complexity because the voice chat in WoW is unused/useless and most Vent owners aren't happy with 20 different randoms turning up each night.

I can see that not being so likely to play with people first might hurt retention but the fact that people can self-gear to t9 without guild help is huge.

If we see cross-server raids then it may hurt guilds. Frankly I'd rather join random raids than commit to a guild if I thought they could regularly beat the bosses.

Not at all.I have not seen anyone place an app for the guild im in, based on a dungeon since... well since Vanilla WoW tbh. Maybe that is a raiding guild thing, where smaller guilds (possibly 10 manned only raid guilds aswell) might have gotten new members through dungeon runs, this has not been the case for us.

There has been a clear downside to this though, when you do run dungeons you don't make friends anymore. And maybe those friends would later join your guild so... Well I think I just ranted my way to agreeing, that indirectly it might become more trial based to join a new guild because of the dungeon tool.

I think the faction switching has caused more turnover than the new LFD system so far. The downside I see to the new LFD system is that now people seem much more likely to just jump right into 'The System' without even bothering to try to put together a guild group. As someone who doesn't like pugging and likes to see guild solidarity, I see this as a problem, though not a huge one yet.

@Stabs: I know what you mean with the filling out with PUGs. In the past I've seen a lot of guild runs never get going for lack of interested people.

@Dw-redux: Clearly you're very convincing!

@jeffo: I have to admit to being one of those people. Why spend the time to ask in gchat and wait for people to finish what they're doing to respond and join when I can press a couple buttons and get a group instantly?